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"For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied."
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"Death is the ultimate cessation of the individual Self."

"DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH."

"Funerals, I had decided, are for the living."

"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death."

"No one dies in the language of the Gnani (the Self-realized one) and every one dies in the language of the agnani (non-Self-realized person). The agnani (non-Self-realized person) mourns and grieves, and the Gnani simply 'Sees'."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."


"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."


"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."


"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."


"No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain."


"The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility."


"Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer."
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